So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that when Chicago trumpeter Orbert Davis learned of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, Davis had to protest.

He did so on Facebook by “talking about my musical friends,” remembers the musician.

“I have friends who were the first to come to America in search of educational opportunities. I thought of Kalyan Pathak, the Indian drummer,” who immigrated to Chicago in the 1990s and ever since has enriched jazz here (and around the world) with ragas and other facets of his heritage.

“I have friends whose ancestors were stolen from their homes and became slaves, as my ancestors were. And I have friends whose ancestors escaped Europe because of the Holocaust” — or miraculously survived it.

“So I posted this post, and I got about 100 responses in the first 30 minutes, none of which was more complete than Howard Levy’s,” adds Davis, referring to the Chicago harmonica virtuoso. “I gave him a call right away. We talked about it. We sort of just asked: What do we do as artists about this?”

For Davis and Levy, the answer to that question was as obvious as it was inevitable: Take action through music.

Thus, on June 14, Davis’ Chicago Jazz Philharmonic — in collaboration with Levy, Pathak and others — will take the stage of Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park to present the world premiere of “Chicago Immigrant Stories,” an hourlong suite intertwining jazz with music of China, West Africa and South Asia/India.

Davis and friends have been working on this project for most of the past year, holding conversations, rehearsals and performances with musicians from each of these communities to lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural epic.

Not that the process has been easy.

“When we started with the Chinese-American musicians, it didn’t work,” says Davis, “because we started with a jazz experience.”

Meaning that Davis and key members of his Chicago Jazz Philharmonic at first attempted a jam session with their Chinese-American counterparts. That was a mistake, because jazz improvisation “was foreign to their experience,” he explains.

“So we turned the tables and said: You play, and we’ll improvise.”

That’s when the music of two cultures began to communicate, says Davis, who spent uncounted hours improvising with musicians from each of the three ethnic communities.

“We just were trying different things, talking it through,” adds Davis. “I recorded every minute of it, and, basically, from that created the compositions.”

What was the experience like for the immigrant musicians?

“Interesting,” says Indian percussionist Pathak.

“Orbert said he wanted immigrant stories about resilience, about how we survive,” adds Pathak, who will speak, sing and play percussion during the performance.

In this work “you’ll hear Indian-inspired jazz harmony, Indian-inspired string orchestrations and some traditional colors of India from my tabla playing and singing. You’ll hear Indian musicians breaking rules all over the place, and you’ll hear jazz musicians trying to meet Indian musicians on their turf.”

If all of this sounds a bit unorthodox, it’s worth remembering that mid-20th century jazz visionaries such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and others boldly experimented with currents of Indian music. Similarly, even as jazz was emerging at the turn of the previous century, the music embraced elements of Spanish, Caribbean and French musical culture.

“It is the job of the jazz musician to expand the music into the future,” says Pathak, citing the modes (or scale patterns) that Davis used as inspiration for his landmark “Kind of Blue” album.

“In ‘Kind of Blue,’ we hear modes mixed with the blues. But there are so many more ragas that we can take into this concept. Jazz musicians need to explore more than what Miles and Coltrane went into long ago.”

That’s what Pathak and others will be doing with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, which also will feature passages of contrapuntal West African drumming. Davis has shaped the suite in seven movements bearing titles such as “Thirteen Million Voices,” “Raga to Raga Journey” and “Fantasy on Fighting Against Typhoon.”

Whether all of this coheres into a comprehensible narrative or unfolds as a clash of idioms remains to be heard, but Davis has no doubts about what this music will be trying to say.

“The one thing that will be phenomenal is that the audience will see a representation of true cultural diversity — they’ll witness it, and they’ll hear it,” says Davis.

“I hope that the end result will be that when the audience (members) look at themselves, they’ll see that they’re the same.

“Because the things that make us who we are, are behind our skin.”

Nothing expresses that idea more viscerally than music, and no music is better equipped to articulate it than jazz, a music of liberation invented by a people once enslaved and long persecuted.

Or, as Davis puts it, “Jazz in America started with the most oppressed, but it has become a gift to the world.”

In that spirit, Davis hopes “Chicago Immigrant Stories” can extend that contribution.

“Chicago Immigrant Stories” will begin at 6:30 p.m. June 14 at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; admission is free. The event kicks off a three-concert series by the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, which also will perform at Pritzker Pavilion at 6:30 p.m. July 16 and Aug. 29. Phone 312-742-1168 or visit www.millenniumpark.org or www.chicagojazzphilharmonic.org.